Stories Found In Shuttle's Debris

April 27, 2003|By DAVE SCHLECK Daily Press

HAMPTON — Technicians at NASA Langley Research Center work in big buildings with big machines that look like torture devices -- blowing torrents of air and tearing and tugging at materials that might someday become a lifeline for pilots, passengers and astronauts.

When those lifelines break, when a space shuttle tears apart, their work rings with a whole new timbre. Suddenly, they're called away from their big buildings in Hampton and sent to Texas, where the parts that they once put to the test are now strewn across wild terrain.

Suddenly, they're meeting American Indians from far-off areas and locals who teach them that their adventure will be as much about people as it is about parts.

Suddenly, they're collecting pieces of lost lives.

"It would just kind of hit you," said Cheri Bailey, one of 20 Langley technicians sent to Texas to collect debris from the space shuttle Columbia. Those pieces -- more than 70,000 of them retrieved since Columbia tore apart over Texas on Feb. 1 -- were supposed to help the seven astronauts aboard return home safely.

The Langley technicians found several items, including a shuttle tire, medical packs and empty food packets color-coded for each astronaut, said Charles Poupard, head of Langley's applied technologies and testing branch.

"When you pick one of those out of the brush, you know it belonged to somebody," Poupard said about the food packets. "Everybody treated everything with dignity, as if it was one of your own family members."

Lynn Curtis, head of Langley's wind-tunnel technicians, found mission patches that astronauts carry on shuttle flights so they can later pass the patches out to schoolchildren.

"You know that was inside the shuttle," Curtis said about his find.

NASA prohibits the searchers from saying anything about human remains that they might have found during the search, out of respect for the astronauts' families.

Since early March, five teams from Langley have been taking turns spending a week or two with thousands of workers from local, state and federal agencies in one of the largest ground searches in history.

"It was an important historical event," technician Glenn Brehm said, "and to be a part of it was great."

NASA has recovered about a third of the shuttle and is collecting the parts in a hangar at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Many of the pieces have serial numbers on them, which help investigators identify the debris.

"Anything that had a number on it, they were excited to have," Poupard said.

Squads of about 40 people spread out in lines 20 feet apart and covered about four acres a day in a 2,400-square-mile area.

Many of the searchers belonged to American Indian tribes that have an employment agreement with the Forest Service to fight fires or respond to efforts such as the Columbia debris recovery. Their awareness of nature helped guide NASA workers -- who were mainly there to help identify debris -- get around in the rough terrain of East Texas.

"We went down there to search for parts," Poupard said. "Parts is what we do every day. But I got more out of it from working with the people. Every day, they had this excitement -- we're going to find something today."

Langley technicians gave NASA stickers to searchers as souvenirs of their shared experience. Brehm brought back some souvenirs of his own -- branches with 2-inch-long thorns.

"This is what we were walking through down there," Brehm said. He lost 8 pounds trudging through ravines and thicket in unpopulated areas where the weather ranged from snowy to steamy.

Dry socks were the hot commodities. Your walking stick was your best friend. And you had to watch out for the wild pigs, which chased people who got too close to their young.

But the Langley searchers agree that the sweat and toil were worth it. Not one of them wanted to leave the recovery effort in Texas.

"I'm very proud to be a part of it," Curtis said.

Dave Schleck can be reached at 247-7430 or by e-mail at dschleck@dailypress.com